


Slide Over Here, Tell Me The Truth

by AndreaLyn



Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: Bodyswap, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-03
Updated: 2017-09-03
Packaged: 2018-12-23 09:37:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11987133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndreaLyn/pseuds/AndreaLyn
Summary: Vasquez says the wrong thing to the wrong person and now they're stuck inside one another's body and the only apparent fix is to be honest with each other. Given what Faraday has been holding back, he's not sure he sees that happening.





	Slide Over Here, Tell Me The Truth

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Kesha's _Boots_.

“What did you two do?” Sam asks.

Faraday had thought he’d been doing fine trying to fake that whole lithe, rangy swagger that Vasquez walks with, but the instant that they get back to camp, Sam takes one long look at them, grimaces, and rats them out. Red passes them, muttering under his breath in Comanche, though Faraday gets the feeling it’s along the lines of _I told you it wasn’t going to work_. Faraday turns to find his own face staring disapprovingly at him, which makes him shift back warily, not liking the way that looks.

“Do my eyes always do that when I glare? What’s with the little forehead line” he asks, wincing when he hears his words come out in Vasquez’s voice.

Yeah. His words, Vasquez’s mouth, Vasquez’s voice, Vasquez’s tongue.

So, it turns out that when you accidentally insult a Comanche elder when in her territory, she’s more than willing to call up some very old magics to make you pay for it, insisting that the curse would only be broken when Faraday and Vasquez ‘bore truth to their hidden secrets’. It’s horseshit and it’s ridiculous, but it’s got him in Vasquez’s body and vice-versa, which had seemed real fun until it didn’t go away even after a few half-hearted apologies and he didn’t even get more than a few seconds around the others of pretending to be Vasquez.

“Faraday insulted the woman we were going to meet,” Vasquez blames.

“I did not!” Faraday retorts wildly, gesturing out and nearly taking off Goody’s head given that he’s not accommodating for Vasquez’s ridiculously long limbs. “I’m not the one who spouted on all that crap and disrespect about her ways and her land. That was all you, _hombre_.” Ugh, god, it even sounds _right_ when he says it now, he’ll never annoy Vasquez like that.

Then again, this whole body switching situation seems to have put Vasquez in a permanently annoyed state, not that Faraday is far behind. “I need a damn drink.”

“I need four,” Vasquez one-ups him. 

“You probably do,” Faraday admits, “I have a high tolerance for a lot of crap.”

“Yeah? Well, so do I!”

He hears Red behind them talking about what happened with Sam, but Faraday resolutely ignores anything he hears about “those idiots”, using those long legs of Vasquez’s to stride towards the saloon a little faster when he hears Sam muttering a lot of ‘for god’s sake’ and ‘get your asses back here!’. 

“Move, guero,” Vasquez snaps, forcibly shoving at him from behind to pick up the pace.

“Ugh, god, is that what it feels like, hearing me butcher Spanish?” Faraday asks, wincing heavily and beginning to understand so much more about Vasquez than he did before.

On their way inside, he’s absolutely sure that he hears Goodnight ask Sam whether this is actually happening, not to mention Sam’s weary reply that they’d better settle in before the storm gets worse.

* * *

The town they’re staying in has a generous inn that’s allowed them to forego bunking with each other, which is one hell of a convenient thing. Faraday is drunk enough that he keeps forgetting that he’s not in his usual body, this time forgetting until he squints into the speckled, dirty mirror in his room and sees Vasquez’s face staring back at him after a long night of drinking with himself. The shock is a funny thing to see on a different face and Faraday then spends about fifteen minutes poking and prodding at Vasquez’s features, making all sorts of faces. Then, when he makes sure the door is locked and no one’s going to see fit to bother him, Faraday thinks about something else.

He lets long fingers settle at his collarbone, stroking absently as Faraday’s heartrate picks up, his breathing growing a little heavier. He inhales sharply and smells the tang of Vasquez’s leather vest, the cigarette smoke that clings to his linen shirt, the sweat, and the tequila from his lips. 

In retrospect, what he does next is probably the stupidest thing in a long list of stupid decisions that Faraday has ever made.

At the time, it seems pretty damn straightforward. Faraday drags the full-length mirror to face him and show the length of his body. These little thoughts of his seem so innocent for the most part, but now he’s got the once in a lifetime chance to actually see what it is he dreams about in his half-waking moments or when he’s had too much to drink and thinks what it might be like to get his hands on Vasquez.

Sure, it’s not _his_ hands, exactly, but there’s no reason Vasquez needs to find out about Faraday doing a little bit of exploring.

Carefully, slowly, he starts to unbutton the vest as he stands with feet shoulder-width apart and stares at himself in the mirror. Turns out, if he focuses hard enough, he can make Vasquez’s face do this _come hither and fuck me_ thing with his eyes that looks a little familiar, though he can’t peg where it is last time he saw it.

As it is, there’s just enough of a divide in his mind helpfully provided by the liquor that lets him believe that he’s doing this to Vasquez, not to himself.

Rolling his shoulders back, he lets the vest drop to the floor in a heavy pile, reaching behind him for the back of the linen shirt that he neatly yanks up and over his head. The room’s hot and there’s trickles of sweat running down the column of his neck and over his chest, not to mention a very well-defined torso on display now that Faraday’s stripped off his clothes. 

For a brief moment, he’s distracted by the sharp line of a scar on Vasquez’s arm, rubbing it gently as if he can somehow soothe this old ache of Vasquez’s, like the other man could somehow feel the comfort even so far away and in another body.

That’s over quick enough as Faraday sheds his boots and starts to work those ridiculous leather trousers of Vasquez’s open, shimmying them down and kicking them off. When he stands upright again, he’s completely naked as the day the man was born down in Mexico, apart from that shiny medallion laying flat on his breastbone.

Faraday inhales sharply, breath caught in his chest, and _stares_ his fill.

It’d be wrong of him to touch, wouldn’t it?

Yeah, it’d definitely be wrong.

Too bad he can’t convince his drunken mind of the same thing, angling his body towards the mirror as he wraps his hand around Vasquez’s dick, the sweet drag of his calloused fingers over the length of it drawing a pretty little moan from Vasquez’s lips.

And oh, he knows it’s stupid, but he’s only got one shot at this, doesn’t he?

“Faraday,” he exhales, just to hear what it’d sound like. Good, but not the best he can do. “Joshua,” he tries next, accompanied by a harder stroke that elicits a hitched whimper at the end of his name, hitched and still accented because no matter how hard he’s tried, he can’t inflect his own accent into Vasquez’s voice. Shit, that sounds good, almost too good to his ears. The only shame of it is that it ain’t Vasquez at all, just a close impression.

Reaching for his bottle of whiskey, he lets that thought crash over him like a wave as he collapses in the bed, knowing that no matter how tempting it is to touch himself more (hell, even find out what Vasquez looks like when he comes), there’s a part of him that so sorely wants to find out for real.

He wants that orgasm brought about by his hands, his mouth, his skills.

Shame that there’s no way in hell Vasquez would ever let that happen. Faraday tries to banish that maudlin thought with a hell of a lot more booze, drinking heavily until he passes out and doesn’t have to think about how he probably just wasted his one shot at getting his hands all over Vasquez’s body, even if they just so happen to be the man’s own at this particular moment in time.

* * *

In the morning, he wakes up and he’s still wearing Vasquez’s body, which actually isn’t so bad because the man apparently had been telling the truth about not getting hangovers much. He rolls over and crawls into a sitting position, taking a few moments to pat himself down and confirm that yup, still in Vasquez’s body. Still naked, too, which brings last night back into sharp contrast and while Faraday might insist that he’s not a man prone to guilt, there’s still a warm rush of something that feels suspiciously like it that sweeps through him.

Grimacing, he stumbles to his feet and tries to deal with the rumbling in his stomach. Vasquez’s body is always hungry, something that he’s still not used to. Yanking on yesterday’s clothes haphazardly, he wanders downstairs on autopilot, plunking himself down in the first open chair, which just so happens to be next to Red.

“Still not fixed,” Red says with displeasure, like somehow, it’s Faraday’s fault that it isn’t. “You were supposed to talk to him last night.”

Is that why Red kept plying them with alcohol? Faraday had thought it strange that their quiet friend had kept shoving new glasses of whiskey and tequila their way, but apparently, he’d hoped that they’d act as some kind of social lubricant to fix the problem.

“Talk about what, Red?” he asks, signalling to one of the fine ladies that he’s ready to eat. He stares resolutely forward at his hands as he tries not to think about what he did get up to that definitely hadn’t been _talking_.

“You want to fix this, you need to be honest.”

“Honest about what? I don’t lie to Vasquez,” Faraday gripes, which is true enough. He might be flashy and showy and stretch his truths a little, but when it comes down to it, he trusts the man enough that there’s no lying going on at all. 

Red looks at him, unimpressed, and clearly doesn’t believe him. “She wouldn’t have done what she did without reason,” come the heavy words, taking some time to come out so Red can really wrap his head around them. “Switching your bodies, it means that whatever you’re lying about, it has to do with that. Maybe knowing one another better?”

Some filthy, awful part of Faraday clamps down on the desire to laugh about the notion that some old Comanche woman has just helped Faraday get inside Vasquez and he didn’t even need any lube to do it. 

“It’s something very personal, I think,” Red says.

Faraday sucks in a breath sharply because Red is hovering far too close to the truth and he suspects that if he gets any closer, he’s bound to figure it out. It damn well probably is something very personal, but he’s not sure why the hell the out for this punishment could possibly be telling Vasquez something that’ll get him, at best, punched and, at worst, shot.

Maybe it’s just to punish Vasquez by forcing him to live inside a _gringo_ body? 

“What a goddamn shamble,” Faraday complains, grateful when breakfast turns up and he can tuck in and not have to worry about this right now, hunched over and eating like this might be his last meal.

Red watches him with mild disgust, shaking his head.

“If you want to fix it,” he says as he stands, taking his leave, “then talk to Vasquez. Honestly.”

Faraday waves a hand to promise that he’ll think about it. Right now, the only thing he cares about is the food in front of him, which his determined stomach is quick to remind him. Lucky, really, because it serves as a good distraction from what happened last night and all the things he hasn’t been telling Vasquez about all the ways he wants to touch him and be with him, not to mention that he’s still not entirely sure how to fix this.

Well, that last one’s a lie. 

He’s got a pretty good idea, but Faraday just doesn’t like what he’s going to have to do.

* * *

Honest with each other. Faraday snorts as he searches for a smoke, finding that this body of his craves one damn near every hour and if he hasn’t had one, he starts getting twitchy. Since it’s Vasquez’s fault that he’s craving cigarettes like crazy, he decides that the man needs to be provide him the goods.

“Hey,” he says, knocking heavily on Vasquez’s door. “Let me in, I need a smoke.”

Vasquez had made off with his things, which means that all of Faraday’s cigarettes have probably already been smoked, but there’s a chance that some still remain. Faraday hears the creaking of the wooden floor, then the door is opened all of a few inches. It’s disconcerting, staring at your own face, and worse when Red has basically told you what to do to get back into it. 

Somehow, _tell Vasquez you’ve touched his body and want to do more touching_ isn’t any kind of honest he thinks will do anything but get him punched. 

“I woke up again this morning in your body,” Vasquez complains, stepping back to let him in when his initial grievance has been aired. “How come it’s not fixed?”

Faraday wanders inside, running his fingers through his hair before he remembers it’s not his, hissing in complaint when Vasquez reaches out and digs his fingers into Faraday’s hair (well, his own hair, really) and strokes it back a few times, nearly sending him into apoplectic, heart-attack shock when he does. The wide-eyed terror must be a strange and worrying sight, because Vasquez stares down at his hands like they’ve done something wrong. 

“You were fucking it up,” Vasquez mumbles his excuse. 

Faraday feels paralyzed and not sure what to do, so he focuses on getting a cigarette between his fingers. He reaches out for one when Vasquez hands it over, heart beating wildly as he thinks about those fingers in his hair and how Vasquez’s body had damn near done a full body shiver at just the barest of touches. Sure, he could be logical and rational and tell himself that it’s him that did that, but it’s just so much more promising imagining that Vasquez’s body has been waiting for Faraday’s hands to card through his hair like that.

“Red says that we need to be honest with each other,” he ekes out the words, sounding unsure of himself as he toys with the cigarette, but doesn’t light up just yet. “I told him I don’t know what the hell he’s going on about seeing as we’re plenty honest. He seems to think there’s something we’re holding back,” says Faraday, as if he doesn’t already know that one big truth he’s keeping back.

It just so happens to be the one that could get him good and shot, if not lassoed (well, not that, seeing as that’s in Faraday’s room at the moment not to mention it’s one hell of a turn-on that he'd rather not talk about), but it’s still a dangerous prospect.

“Honest?” Vasquez echoes, sounding wary and nervous. “How honest?”

“Red says that there’s a reason she did _this_. That, somehow, it’s related to what we’re meant to tell one another,” Faraday rambles, still not sure why they’ve had their bodies switched, though it has led to something that he needs to be honest about. He’s not sure that’s it, seeing as it happened after the whole switcharoo, but hell, might as well get it out there. “There’s something I ought to tell you,” he admits, in the interest of honesty, since that seems to be the word of the day.

“ _Que pasó_?” Vasquez asks, somehow making Faraday’s mouth form those sounds a hell of a lot prettier than he ever anticipated possible.

“Last night, after we were done drinking, I went upstairs and I took all your clothes off.”

Vasquez gives him a dubious look, like he’s not sure why this is a problem. “I do the same when I go to bed. Why is this a big deal?”

“Vas, I took _everything_ off,” Faraday clarifies. “Then, I looked. I looked a lot,” he says, feeling like now that he’s started talking, there’s nowhere to go but down. “Then I touched,” he says, because if he’s in for a penny, he’s in for the pound. Maybe he’s ready to try being honest, because he doesn’t exactly relish the idea of being stuck in Vasquez’s body permanently. “I’ve been wanting to touch for months, now, probably since I healed up at Rose Creek. It felt wrong, though, so I stopped,” he admits, not saying how much he’d liked touching Vasquez, how he’d said his own name, how he’d only stopped because he wanted to do it properly.

Vasquez has gone pale, gaping at Faraday, which makes sense. This isn’t exactly what he probably anticipated hearing.

“You didn’t do the same, huh?” Faraday supposes.

Vasquez shakes his head, looking a bit numb. “No, I…”

“Yeah, figured. Look, just don’t shoot me and I won’t…”

“I didn’t think it was right to do that, no matter how much I wanted.”

Faraday’s dignity is intact, apparently, but that’s not even remotely close to the most important part of this conversation. He gapes at Vasquez, fairly sure that he’d just heard the other man admit that he wants to touch Faraday. 

“Wait,” Faraday says, trying to wrap his head around it, but he doesn’t have time to collect his wits.

He’s opening his mouth to ask more questions when Vasquez takes a few determined steps to cross the room, backing Faraday against the door with a heavy _thump_ before he’s kissing him with a dizzying amount of clumsy passion, which is enough of a shock for Faraday to drop the cigarette to the ground. It takes Faraday a second to figure out why he feels so dizzy, mainly because when he’d started being kissed, he’d been the one against the door, but somehow in the middle of things, he’s the one pressing a thigh between Vasquez’s legs and rolling his hips forward to help pin Vasquez in.

Stepping back long enough to admire his rough hands, those good ol’ callouses, and the breadth of his shoulders, Faraday’s eyes light up with joy when he looks forward and gets to see Vasquez’s beautiful face and his pulse leaping while little beads of sweat roll over his skin, begging Faraday to kiss and touch and taste them.

“I’m me again,” he announces gleefully, noting that Vasquez looks equally pleased.

That pleasure falls away almost instantly when he realizes that Faraday’s no longer kissing him. Deciding that needs to be immediately remedied, Faraday tangles his fingers into that linen shirt of Vasquez’s and slides his way back to a trail of exploratory kisses down and then back up the line of Vasquez’s neck, brushing against his earlobe with his lips as he kisses along his stubbled jaw for a real kiss again.

“Feel like doing some more touching?” Faraday asks, almost ready to cry over the fact that he sounds like himself again and he’s back to _normal_. 

Apparently, that old Comanche woman is just a dirty matchmaker at heart, and maybe Faraday shouldn’t be so angry at her, though in future, he’ll still try and shut Vasquez up the minute he opens that big mouth of his to say any number of stupid things when they’re out trying to do their job and Vasquez decides on being an idiot. 

“Get on the bed,” Vasquez demands, voice in a throaty register that Faraday didn’t even know it could do.

He’s fairly keen to find out what else he’s been missing and there’s nothing at all stopping him anymore. It’s a damn good morning to be Josh Faraday, he decides, back at home with himself and feeling pretty lucky.

* * *

“So,” Sam says, sitting down to coffee with Red as he steadfastly ignores the heavy thumping upstairs, which is immediately followed by the sound of bedsprings creaking, Vasquez yelping in alarm, and Faraday’s moans soon after. If he fixates hard enough on his coffee, he decides that those sounds are going to go away. “I take it things are fixed?”

Red doesn’t wince when they hear Faraday hissing upstairs for Vasquez to ‘move those goddamn fingers’, but it’s a close thing. “Unfortunately,” he says darkly.

There’s another bump that sounds vaguely like the headboard hitting the wall. Sam is plenty happy to turn a blind eye to this sort of thing, especially if it means things are getting back to normal, but this is stretching those boundaries of tolerance for him.

“You know, it’s a beautiful day,” Sam says. “How about we enjoy this coffee out there?” he says, tin cup of coffee already in hand as he heads outside, trying to purge his memory of that last little snippet he’d just heard, seeing as he doesn’t think he ever wanted to know the particulars of the pet names Vasquez uses in the bedroom. Only, now he knows.

Red does too, not to mention probably anyone who’s awake and present upstairs.

Under his breath, Red mutters something in Comanche that indicts the quality of the men that Sam had brought together for this job and kept alongside to serve justice. On any other day, he might feel the need to defend his men, but today? 

“Trust me, sometimes I wonder why I did it, myself,” agrees Sam darkly as they head outside to enjoy the beautiful day, the hot coffee, but most importantly, the blessed _silence_.


End file.
